Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.
In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn't been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.
Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal's adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.
It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.
After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
[Germany - Bavaria Elections]
38% Christian Social Union (+1%) (Right Wing - Nationalistic party of the local bourgeoise with interventionist policies designed to keep local business in advantageous positions over competition from other parts of the country; pragmatic af and traditionalist)
16% Free Voters Association (+4%) (Right Wing - Follows basically the same policies as the CSU. The party leader and deputy governor of the state was recently impacted by a scandal where it was revealed he quite possibly had a past as a violent fascist during his school years. He deflected it by blaming his brother instead and the CSU has defended him against the evil left)
14% Alternative for Germany (unchanged) (Far-Right - Your constantly radicalizing post-2015 European right wing party, which gained a lot of support this year over denouncing the anti-Russian foreign policy of Germany. They think Putin is based after all.)
13% Green Party/Alliance '90 (-1%) (Centre-Right - Neoliberal war hawks and very enthusiastic followers of the international rules-based order. They lost a lot of support in recent months over "fuck poor people" environmentalism, increasing poverty and culture wars from the AfD and CDU/CSU)
8% Social Democratic Party (unchanged) (Centre-Right - Your usual case of washed up socdems, now neoliberals, flopping on every issue known to man. They haven't been hit as hard by the decline of the popularity of the government as the Greens or FDP, but the name will not excite anyone but the weirdest of voters)
4% Free Democratic Party (unchanged) (Right Wing - Hardcore economic neoliberals, running on a campaign of "Austerity = good, car = freedom, I fucking love technology". They have a sizeable base of rich people and annoying libertarians but as a silver lining they've been eating shit when it comes to convincing anyone else to support them)
1% The Left (-2%) (Left Wing - What happens if you combine constant infighting to either pull the party into being patsocs or regular libs between a large minority of members and the federal leadership, liberal Putler-mania denouncing the peace movement, a very small membership basis that's almost non-existent outside of cities beyond weirdos like me, a campaign basing on "we are the only ones that don't approve of the CSU" and a backlash against a supposedly left wing government? Nothing good.)
1% Bavaria Party (unchanged) (Far-Right - Why yes, Bavarian indipendentists. They only have any relevance in the weirdest of mountain villages in the corelands of Bavaria and have been politically irrelevant since the early 1960s)
5% Others [Ecological Democratic Party - Environmentalists who don't like gays, used to be neo-nazi until the 80s | the Base - "vaccines scary", the party. | Animal Protection Party - Single issue party | Party for Change, Vegetarians and Vegans - same as before | Party of Humanists - the reddit party | Volt - the reddit party 2]
So I'm guessing CSU and FW will keep being in control of the government and do their thing. It's quite something that like at least nominally left parties make up barely 10%
German politics are truly cursed. My favorite is when the krauts try to claim the moral high ground on human rights because they did the Holocaust so they know about how evil people can get or whatever…
Their brains are in backwards. Having done the Holocaust means we should ignore you for a century, not listen to you more
To my understanding Bavaria has been this fucked up since at least the end of WWII. Do you know why?
Pork Barrel politics. Bavaria got rich leeching off overproportionally from the federal budget and the fluke of skilled surplus labor coming from fashies fleeing west Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945. Then it used that newfound advantage + protectionism of local industries to become wealthier and develop the region over the rest of Germany and then brag about how the "Bavarian Special Way" is superior.
The CSU had a poster I saw recently with "In Bavaria you live better." on it, and most locals would probably agree, I think.
Is this like a microcosm of when Europe stole all its wealth and then bragged about their superior ubermensch civilization leading them to prosperity
I call it the imperial core of the imperial core, yeah.
What?
Rightist, my mistake in typing. They were founded by American style libertarians, which have over time lost the internal power struggle with Nazis.